The premier issue of a publication dedicated to electronic art, or, as we have called it on our cover, personal computer aesthetics. Thanks for buying it. 

As often seems to be the case with really new endeavors, this project has evolved with its own kind of energy. It's a result of surges of work performed by creative people using mostly Macintosh computers and a host of amazing programs. Also, thankfully, it's been helped along by a series of lucky events that kind of pushed it along and shaped its development, production and marketing. 

We are working with art, yes. Defining that concept when it's associated with personal computers is, admittedly, difficult. But only because personal computer art is so new that at this time it eludes easy summarization. We know that it's more than charts and logos and page lay-outs (excited as we are about these more commercial applications). We know that there is indeed something original going on here as a pure art form. These affordable, powerful little computers provide artists with a new kind of immediacy, not only in creating images, but also in importing, modifying, combining and manipulating them. And as this publication and others hopefully illustrate, there is a very real "art" to the desktop publishing process itself. 

VERBUM reflects its medium: the neo-natural order that is emerging out of silicon and electronic energy. We are speaking and working with these robot heads, using them to express ourselves in words and .n the next year or two computers powerful enough for good graphics will be so small and cheap that any artist will be able to own one. Then computer art will move out of the laboratory setting, and talent will count more than social skill in determining who gets to do it. I'meager to see what images come out when computer graphics are made by artists in desert shacks or rain forests." 

—David Em Los Angeles computer artist,

Omni. April 1985